Bus Driver Jim

Com Center

Posted on Wednesday, May 22, 2013 by Jim

This is my morning view five days a week, Monday through Friday, from 0750 to 0815. I’m here in my TRPTA bus waiting for any Victor Community School kids needing a ride south. It’s like a box of chocolates, I never know what I’m going to get.

During the winter I watched the Targhee buses pick up and drop off employees and skiers here, but that’s over. I’ve got the place to myself now as the Ice Sculptures are a long ago faded memory and the grass is greening up for the Farmers Market.

The Driggs Community Center is the hub of the Valley and I have to say it’s a pretty fine view as I stand at the bottom of my vehicles passenger steps reading sad news about tornadoes in Oklahoma on my smartphone.

I hitched through Oklahoma back in the sixties and spent one warm summer night sleeping in a field there. When I woke up an old farmer gave me a ride in his old truck. I told him I was from California and he told me about his nephew in Visalia, CA. Turns out his nephew was my best friend from middle school back in that small little town. Just one of many coincidences as my life progresses.

Posted in The Bus | 1 Comment

Receding Snowlines

Posted on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 by Jim

As the summer approaches and work slows down I find myself with nice two hour mid-day breaks where I can jump in my truck and go exploring. Today I went to one of our many unfinished subdivisions to document the vanishing winter on both sides.

Here’s the Big Hole mountains to the west and the Teton foothills to the east.

SlideShow (Receding Snowlines)

Posted in The Valley | 2 Comments

Map Apps

Posted on Monday, May 20, 2013 by Jim

What a wild wet weekend we just had! It started raining Friday evening and didn’t let up until Sunday afternoon. We had just enough time to enjoy the hottub for a bit before it started raining again. It was a relatively warm rain (40′s) and as the clouds lifted off the mountains I was shocked to still see snow up there.

Anyway, it was a great weekend to hunker down and work on Google map code. I needed a simple and fast map app to display places for my charging station location program and other upcoming projects. I started with a simple HTML5 structure without jQuery or jQuery Mobile and without any external JavaScript or CSS files. It’s just a stand-alone app that uses pure Google Map Services and I’m very pleased to say it scales great on my smartphone, tablet and my giant monitor.

I then wrote another version that plots directions between two places, just like Google Maps does. (we both use the same Google Services :-) Now I need to write one more app that accepts user addresses, to bind them together.

Here’s the Map app and here’s the Directions app.

Posted in Site Stuff | 2 Comments

Integrity

Posted on Saturday, May 18, 2013 by Jim

Sometimes a light reflection from the back of a tissue box can spark a profound thought: Your current expression of integrity is a reflection of the current age of your soul.

As my soul continues to age my integrity matures and solidifies and becomes the foundation of my evolving existence. I watch the world around me and I’m disgusted by the games people play to make money and achieve power at the expense of others.

Integrity is simple. Be yourself, be honest, speak your own truth, don’t take shit from anybody and fight back when you encounter evil!

So why don’t we just paint Integrity:

And to speak my own truth, this is the tissue box on top of my toilet.

Posted in Various | 3 Comments

Browser Security

Posted on Saturday, May 18, 2013 by Jim

Over the last 45 years of my involvement in computer technology I’ve often glazed people’s eyes over when trying to explain an important concept, and I’ve been guilty of it here on my blog several times. Often I say to myself just shut-up Jim!, nobody want’s to learn stuff here, they want to see pictures and read witty content!

Well damn it, blogs can offer teachable moments also, so here goes:

Your window to the internet is your browser of choice. Personally, I have all the major PC browsers installed for testing purposes, but I use FireFox as my main development tool and personal browser.

My general purpose extensions include Adblock Plus (a no-brainer), Case Changer which lets me convert capped text into sentences when I post on Pinterest, Facepaste grabs entire Facebook photo albums and goo.gl lite creates shortened URLs.

Firefox becomes a brilliant code development platform with extensions like: FireFTP which transfers files to my server, FireQuery, a Firebug code debugger for jQuery and Web Developer, a great set of coding analysis tools.

Ok, I see your eyes glazing over so here’s the meat of this post: Firefox can protect you!

The Web Of Trust extension puts little round dots next to all your clickable links, which represent the personal experiences of a global community of millions of users. Green indicates a site has been rated safe, grey is questionable and red means don’t click!.

Ghostery is perhaps my favorite extension. Every time you visit a website you are being tracked by an amazing number of invisible web tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons. The reason I know this is because Ghostery traps all of them and shows them to me in a drop-down list in the upper right corner of the browser. I’ve seen 20+ trackers blocked at a time on websites you may use everyday and by blocked I mean the fact that you clicked on that site is never known to all those information mining companies.

The final thing you can do is to use OpenDNS. It’s a bit tricky changing your default Dynamic Name Server settings over to this service but very worth it. Several times it’s detected a vicious website that’s slipped through my bad-ass defenses, and alerted me.

The Web Of Trust, Ghostery and OpenDNS sites have excellent tutorials on how to set them up on your system. I strongly recommend them!

Posted in Various | Leave a comment

Pipers Owie

Posted on Friday, May 17, 2013 by Jim

It’s been a tough week for our kittie. Along with being traumatized by the dogs last week she’s been dealing with a bite on her side, probably from a fight with another cat. We’ve been putting peroxide on it but there was swelling under her skin and this morning she went to the Vet.

They shaved the area around the wound (that’s a four inch haircut) and drained it. It was infected and she’s on antibiotics now.

Steph also got an infected tooth extracted today so the two of them are hunkered down on the couch, watching Netflix. Now where are my rubber gloves…

Evening update: Piper is doing great! I’m thinking that what I perceived as depression this last week was just that she was sick from an infection. Oh yea, Steph is also doing better, she just ran to town for ice cream. :-)

Posted in Piper | 2 Comments

Jamr

Posted on Thursday, May 16, 2013 by Jim

We’ve got a surprisingly high number of restaurants here in Teton Valley, considering our population. It’s also a very fluid market and a bunch have come and gone and a few have jumped the shark for me and I just won’t go back.

Yesterday our new Mexican restaurant Agave jumped before I even tasted the food. I had high hopes for this place, it looked trendy and different, and just before they opened at eleven I gave them a call. A girl answered and I ordered a pork burrito to go and said I would be there precisely at 11:45 to pick it up (I was on a tight schedule).

I called back at 11:44 and asked her to have it cut in half since I was splitting it with Steph. When I walked through the door it was obvious that she had forgotten my request and was scrambling to get the order in. As I stood around the counter for another 15 minutes I was getting steamed. I thought that this better be a mighty fine burrito or I’m done here. Not a good way to treat a brand new customer in a small town.

It turned out to be a sloppy wet mess covered in sauce and liquid cheese. I was hoping for a mission style, the kind you hold in both hands. My buddy Skoge introduced me to the real thing in San Francisco’s Mission District back in the seventies and I’ve had a few good ones since. Not here, this joint is a JAMR (Just Another Mexican Restaurant)!

Posted in The Valley | 2 Comments

Traumatized

Posted on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 by Jim

Last Friday two punk dogs came on our property and chased Piper up a tree. One of them growled at Steph and as I came out of the house yelling loudly they headed to the back field, and I chased after them. At one point the bigger dog stopped and I thought he was going to confront me.

I’m way too old to be intimidated by a dog and I was very pissed off. Sad to say that there is no headline in the local paper this week about “Man kills dog with bare hands” because they kept on going.

Then we had to get Piper down. She was way up one of our thinner leafless trees, about 15 feet. I climbed up to her and Steph got the ladder. It’s a tribute to how much she trusts us when she allowed me to pluck her from a branch and hand her off to Steph.

The really sad thing about this is that Piper is very traumatized now. She used to sit in the field for hours waiting for a vole to pop it’s head up. Now she knows the field is not safe. If she was there when the dogs came she wouldn’t have had an escape route.

As a result she doesn’t go outside much now and stays close to the house when she does. I know this girl very well and this event has definitely affected her.

This is Steph’s old jewelry box located in the furthest part of the house, up against the corner of our bedroom. There’s nothing behind her but wall here, on both sides…

Posted in Piper | 1 Comment

Charge

Posted on Tuesday, May 14, 2013 by Jim

After that sweet Rav4 EV visited our driveway recently I’ve been interested in the refueling issues that owners of these cars face, so I did some research. I’ve discovered a U.S. government agency called NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) that provides an API (Application Programming Interface) which presents a current data set of the locations around the country with electric vehicle recharge stations, by State.

I signed up for their API and then developed this new mobile app called Charge, based on their data. I have to say that not every location is represented as I know there are some in Wyoming but they’re not showing up here. That said, the number of locations in this live data-set is impressive. It takes a bit of time to load up California :-)

I’ve also implemented smart-caching into the app so that once you load a State it stays in memory. When you click on a location within a State it shows the specifics of the charging station. You can launch a Google Map to the place by clicking the address and if you click a phone number it will open your phone app so you can call them.

You can run the app Here.

Posted in Android | 2 Comments